#bonecrafts

*i’d recommend this one in particular, though beware of leaking bottles when you least expect them (...as i can say from personal experience), but i’ve heard good things about this ink as well.  will i be making a post exclusively about paper, pens, grimoires, & ink sometime soon?  ...it’s highly likely.

†see: this, this, this, &  this for an idea of what i’ve been thinking about.  (none of them are sigils, no, but they are examples of what you can do with sass/scss and haml/jade.)

‡twine and twee are normally used for making choose-your-own adventure games, but they’re a hell of a lot more versatile than that.  they’re sort of like... fraternal twins?  they some have similar features, & they’re definitely related, but they’re still very much their own programs in the way they function.  twine is a graphical editor which is definitely more beginner-friendly, whereas twee runs from the command line and is a hell of a lot more flexible than twine.  you can also use them together, er, sort of.

§inform7 is another program with a mostly text-based interface, also intended for making games, and it’s kind of hard to explain what all i’m thinking about this one, so i might end up making some kind of example(...s) sometime soon.

‖ah yes, the first non-freeware program.  it’s $15 and admittedly i only bought it yesterday, but so far it seems... extremely promising.  both pico8 and the next program mentioned- löve- use the programming language lua, which from everything i’ve seen shouldn’t be too hard to pick up if you’ve already got a background in css & any kind of scripting.  anyway, pico8 is very different from the programs i’ve mentioned so far in that it’s designed for making pixel games.  anyway, it’s yet another thing i should make a separate post for, just because of how fucking versatile it is for this sort of thing.

Δdisclaimer: i haven’t really used löve much at all, so i don’t really have the experience to explain how to use it.  i’ll probably pick it up and use it more, however, if only for the sake of being able to make a post about it.

◊SO.  RPGMAKER.  the reason why i didn’t link to it in the bullet is because of a few reasons-

sales.  jesus christ, sales.

and even more than sales- software bundles.

the programs are available on a lot of different sites-

the software publisher’s site

steam

humble bundle

bundle stars

& more that i don’t know of, probably.

there’re several different versions of the program-

rpg maker mv - the newest, which came out late last year.  it’s nice, but because it’s so new, it’s highly unlikely that it’ll go on sale for a significant amount any time soon.

rpg maker vx & vx ace - next newest; iirc vx ace has more functionality than vx does, & i’d definitely recommend it?  vx ace you can occasionally get a really good deal on, and same for the rest of the ones listed.

rpg maker xp

rpg maker 2003

rpg maker 2000